Some years ago I gave a talk about $subject, but somehow it dropped off my radar. Now I'm looking at it again. The idea is to have a function (or set of functions) that would allow the user to get the DDL for any database object. Obviously we already have some functions for things like views and triggers, but most notably we don't have one for tables, something users have long complained about. I have been trying to think of a reasonable interface for a single function, where we would pass in, say, a catalog oid plus an object oid, and maybe some optional extra arguments. That seems a bit fragile, though. The alternative is that we have a separate function for each object type, e.g. pg_get_{objecttype}_ddl. I'm kinda leaning that way, but I'd like some sort of consensus before any work gets done.
Could you do anything with the reg* data types?
Have pg_get_ddl (regclass) return a CREATE TABLE or CREATE VIEW command, as appropriate, while pg_get_ddl (regtype) would return CREATE TYPE etc.
They don't cover all the object types but might be helpful for at least some cases.
